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Reports

While much of our work has been in defense of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), we also support the efforts of the over-100 year old Federal Trade Commission. Recently, powerful special interests convinced the Energy and Commerce Committee to draft (and expect it to vote out soon, likely next week) legislation to severely weaken the FTC's ability to protect the public from identity theft and privacy invasions (including sloppy data security that leads to identity theft), deceptive health marketing claims by sellers of various dangerous or ineffective (or both) products and numerous other last-dollar and other frauds and schemes. We've joined over 30 leading groups in a letter opposing the so-called FTC Process and Transparency Reform Act of 2016 (HR 5510-Burgess (TX)).

Our sixth report analyzing complaints in the CFPB's Public Consumer Complaint Database evaluates mortgage complaints, the number one source of complaints to the CFPB, totaling 38% of nearly 500,000 complaints posted since 2011.

Every year, state governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars through contracts for goods and services, subsidies to encourage economic development, and other expenditures. Accountability and public scrutiny are necessary to ensure that the public can trust that state funds are spent as well as possible.

In recent years, state governments across the country have created transparency websites that provide checkbook-level information on government spending – meaning that users can view the payments made to individual companies as well as details about the goods or services purchased or other public benefits obtained. These websites allow residents and watchdog groups to ensure that taxpayers can see how public dollars are spent.